A New and Unique Trend in Game Development And Publishing

[Bodhesatva]

I absolutely agree with all of this. For those interested, I think the main sticking point between Windbane and I was our perspective. He was viewing through the eyes of a PS3 user; I was (At least attempting) to look through the eyes of an objective hardware sales analyst.

If you're simpy a game player, the Wii-vs-everything-else environment actually works pretty well; the PC, PS3 and 360 will probably share almost every third party game amongst each other from now on, with the currently announced exclusives being the last bunch of games to ever really go in the exclusive direction (And I even expect a few of these remaining stalwarts to fall, as well). If you're a player, who cares if a game is cross platform or not? If you own a system that can play it, you win.

On the other hand, from a hardware distributor's perspective, this is far from ideal. We need only look at the recent spat of annoucements out of the Microsoft and Sony camps to see how bloody this battle has gotten between them; Microsoft seems to have spent an inordinant amount of money to secure exclusive content for GTA IV (not even an exclusive game, just content!) while Sony has done a great deal behind the scenes, including sending a "SWAT team of super engineers" to Epic games in order to make sure that the UE3 engine was working properly on the PS3 platform. Who knows how much money and effort has been spent if we knew the stories behind all the "timed exclusive" titles that have been announced such as Ace Combat 6 and Haze, most of which, I assume, come with some sort of incentive -- perhaps not direct cash, but marketing assistance or distribution assistance, which are, in effect, cash, just spent indirectly.

So the problem isn't that PS3 or 360 owners don't win; they do win, they'll still get a lot of games, most of which will be shared between them. The problem is that the companies making their consoles do not win. Multi-platform titles drive sales of systems, but not of a specific system (which is obviously what console manufacturers would be concerned with), and Microsoft and Sony have become so focused on the same, specific, traditional hardcore gamer audience that they're probably both going to lose money over the course of this generation, when all is said and done (meaning, their net income will be below their net expenditures).